


Slip Your Skin

by etherati



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Identity Porn, M/M, Masturbation, poor walter :(, unmasking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-29 06:29:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3885892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shedding skins, we lose our fit, become loose and formless things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slip Your Skin

**Author's Note:**

> KM prompt: Rorschach faps to the thought of Dan unmasking him.

*  
  
Six AM. Early and late all at once, as the battered body that lives under Rorschach’s shell clambers over the windowsill, pulls himself up into this squalor with a hero’s face tucked safely into his pocket. It feels hot there, weighty. Usually it’s a safe place for it to be.  
  
Usually.  
  
The heat of the tenement is oppressive, close, teeming with the indecency of the lives thrashing between its walls. The plaster seems to heave impossibly under his searching hands, damp and breathing. He gives up pawing for the light switch before he even comes close to finding it, because he can already tell what kind of morning it’s going to be and it’s more suited to darkness, to the half-light and shadow.  
  
_Where monsters dwell, tread lightly, lightly–_  
  
He stumbles to his cot, making far too much noise. There’s a tight burning he’s been fighting ever since that last bust, the pressure unbearable now and he scrambles backwards onto the sheets until the base of his spine hits the wall, leaves him hunched forward over his knees. Weak, weak Walter, desperate and hot and shaking in his ratty suit and why,  _why_ – all because of the way a smile had turned up just so in the diffracted streetlight and the strobe of police blue and red.  _Pathetic._  
  
In his pocket, the scrap of latex still feels heavy, and if he can just focus for a moment, just give himself a moment to pull himself together–  
  
The mask slips on like the settling of a second skin, as natural as ever, pulling taut against flesh that feels too hot, is too flushed with arousal and shame under the indifferent black and white. He can feel the ink pooling across his cheeks, low over his brow, and it is not cooling, does less good than he expects. He grimaces, lifts it over the bridge of his nose, then settles it back around his throat again, leaning back against the wall with his head tilted to the ceiling. He tries to map out the cracks in the paint there through the diminished vision, and fidgets.  
  
A familiar echo has started in his head, like the roar of the ocean trapped in a vessel. Elsewhere in the building, a steady pounding and noises he would rather not hear, rather  _never_  hear. He still feels the scratchy sheets slip against his feet as he spreads his knees wider in response, one hand moving to contain the growing ache, rein it in, press it away.  
  
He doesn’t give in to these temptations – except when he does.  
  
And he almost has it under control, almost, until he remembers the way Nite Owl had looked at him across the field of their victory tonight, like he wanted to split the moment open and sift through its guts and lay the entire beautiful, ghastly thing bare for them both to roll around in, to lose their secrets in. Like it wasn’t the only thing he wanted to rip the layers off of. Like a promise to be as gentle as he could be in the inevitable violence of it all.  
  
One-handed, he pulls the mask up over his nose again, as it had been earlier in the night.  
  
Because he would be gentle, wouldn’t he – he wouldn’t want to destroy whatever he thought swam under Rorschach’s mask, wouldn’t want to tear him to pieces like so many others. He’d only want to take the night and superstition out of him, set him into the daylight and maybe he’d even still want–  
  
No. No, he wouldn’t, not after he’d seen. But that’s fine, that takes things out of his hands and there would be no hanging fruit in range of his grasp, nothing to damn himself with. It’s good.  
  
Under the mask, he closes his eyes.  
  
Nite Owl’s fingers would slip underneath first, always so careful, feeling out the territory before revealing it to the light, and Rorschach presses his own fingers under the edge of the mask, splays them across his cheekbone like it’s something new and precious and not just the tattered geography of neglect and time that he faces in the mirror every morning. The sweat-slick slide of the latex over his knuckles feels so filthy, like such a violation, like reaching inside his own skin.  
  
Not quite knowing what he’s doing, he moves them around a little between skin and not-skin, stretching the mask higher over his cheek with every rocking stroke. His free hand moves to the same time, palming heavily over the damp weight straining against the seam of his pants.  
  
This is wrong. More wrong than the  _thoughts_ , plaguing his waking hours with their wheedling grip on his self-control. More wrong than the way he’d pulled Nite Owl close tonight, hand to the back of his neck, already half-unmasked in the aftermath of the fight and feeling the singing of victory in Nite Owl’s skin, humming under his fingers.  
  
He hadn’t really  _wanted_ – he had to have imagined–  
  
It’s wrong, using the mask this way, and it degrades both the man and the symbol to bring them into such shocking, intimate contact. The roaring in his skull picks up in pitch but all he can feel is the fingertips grazing over skin in the tight space under the mask, pad of his thumb – Nite Owl’s thumb, not his own, not calloused and bitten and rough – pulling at the corner of his mouth.  
  
Distantly, he feels his other hand working a button, tugging at a zipper. A pressure relieved, like a long-held breath finally allowed to explode to the surface, and the teeth of the zipper chafe.  
  
He slips his thumb up under the mask now too, all five digits subsumed by it, and bridges them up and away, letting air rush in against his closed eyelids. Lower, he feels the same air against more heated flesh, the rough pumping of his hand burning against it.  
  
He would be careful, Walter thinks. Like gentling a wild animal, afraid of spooking it. He’d peel this layer back with delicacy, as if it might actually hurt as it comes away, taking in each inch of skin slowly. It’d be out in the city somewhere, dark and miserable, and Nite Owl would be in front of him with light hitting his hands, outlining the flesh as it reached for his own. The horrible freckles first, and the burnt ugly orange of the hair around the nape of his neck, giving him away in pieces and each one feels shocking and exciting and nauseating as it falls away.  
  
The hands would pause there, Nite Owl breathing damp and needy over what he’d already exposed. Maybe he’d say something misguidedly reverent. Maybe he’d just run his lips over the curve of Rorschach’s throat. It’ll all be spoiled the moment the rest of it comes off, so why not wallow in it for a moment and–  
  
Walter twists his hand, wringing up the length of his cock, fingers already wet and slippery. Under him, the bedsprings creak, and it sounds like the groaning give of a fire escape behind his back as he makes one last, halfhearted effort to escape this violation.  
  
Nite Owl would hesitate, and then  _(so close)_ , like pulling off a bandage  _(so hot, so open and exposed, breath curling into the night like the touch of fingers)_ , he would flay the rest of the mask away from him in one motion  _(the bed groans along with him as he reaches lower, sinks one precome-slicked finger into himself, rocking onto it and it's wrong, wrong)_ , baring him to the city in all his festering ugliness.  
  
Walter pulls the latex away then with a sharp inhale, feels the air hit his scalp, his burning ears, the wetness beading at the corner of his eyes as sensation rises up his throat, chokes him. In that moment he expects to see Nite Owl’s rejection, is hoping for it, for the freedom it will bring.  
  
Instead, he sees only the acceptance of eyes that see and know what they’re seeing and don’t care, who are glad for the chance to see it, and he could throw up but instead he comes hard over his pinstripes, shaking and empty and alone.  
  
*  
  
He lies on his side now, not even having bothered to clean up or make himself decent; he’s made this mess and he will lie in it, and one hand searches over his skull and through his hair for something that isn’t there, will never be there. Once a skin is shed it will never fit correctly again. Ruined.  
  
In his dreams, he reaches out with hands that don’t shake and pushes back the goggles and cowl to take Nite Owl for himself in the same way that he’s been taken, and the air tastes like adrenaline and vengeance and like something exposed and honest and sweet, sweeter than anything.  
  
*


End file.
